Paradise

CONSOLATA

In the good clean darkness of the cellar, Consolata woke to the wrenching disappointment of not having died the night before. Each morning, her hopes dashed, she lay on a cot belowground, repelled by her sluglike existence, each hour of which she managed to get through by sipping from black bottles with handsome names. Each night she sank into sleep determined it would be the final one, and hoped that a great hovering foot would descend and crush her like a garden pest. Already in a space tight enough for a coffin, already devoted to the dark, long removed from appetites, craving only oblivion, she struggled to understand the delay. "What for?" she asked, and her voice was one among many that packed the cellar from rafter to stone floor. Several times a week, at night or in the shadowy part of the day, she rose aboveground. Then she would stand outside in the garden, walk around, look up at the sky to see the only light it had that she could bear. One of the women, Mavis usually, would insist on joining her. Talking, talking, always talking. Or a couple of others would come. Sipping from the dusty bottles with handsome names-Jarnac, MTdoc, Haut-Brion and Saint-+milion-made it possible to listen to them, even answer sometimes. Other than Mavis, who had been there the longest, it was getting harder and harder to tell one from another.

What she knew of them she had mostly forgotten, and it seemed less and less important to remember any of it, because the timbre of each of their voices told the same tale: disorder, deception and, what Sister Roberta warned the Indian girls against, drift. The three d's that paved the road to perdition, and the greatest of these was drift. Over the past eight years they had come. The first one, Mavis, during Mother's long illness; the second right after she died. Then two more. Each one asking permission to linger a few days but never actually leaving. Now and then one or another packed a scruffy little bag, said goodbye and seemed to disappear for a while-but only a while. They always came back to stay on, living like mice in a house no one, not even the tax collector, wanted, with a woman in love with the cemetery. Consolata looked at them through the bronze or gray or blue of her various sunglasses and saw broken girls, frightened girls, weak and lying. When she was sipping Saint-+milion or the smoky Jarnac, she could tolerate them, but more and more she wanted to snap their necks. Anything to stop the badly cooked indigestible food, the greedy hammering music, the fights, the raucous empty laughter, the claims. But especially the drift. Sister Roberta would have pulped their hands. Not only did they do nothing except the absolutely necessary, they had no plans to do anything. Instead of plans they had wishes-foolish babygirl wishes. Mavis talked endlessly of surefire moneymaking ventures: beehives; something called "bed and breakfast"; a catering company; an orphanage. One thought she had found a treasure chest of money or jewels or something and wanted help to cheat the others of its contents. Another was secretly slicing her thighs, her arms. Wishing to be the queen of scars, she made thin red slits in her skin with whatever came to hand: razor, safety pin, paring knife. One other longed for what sounded like a sort of cabaret life, a crowded place where she could sing sorrow-filled songs with her eyes closed. Consolata listened to these babygirl dreams with padded, wine-dampened indulgence, for they did not infuriate her as much as their whispers of love which lingered long after the women had gone.

One by one they would float down the stairs, carrying a kerosene lamp or a candle, like maidens entering a temple or a crypt, to sit on the floor and talk of love as if they knew anything at all about it. They spoke of men who came to caress them in their sleep; of men waiting for them in the desert or by cool water; of men who once had desperately loved them; or men who should have loved them, might have loved, would have.

On her worst days, when the maw of depression soiled the clean darkness, she wanted to kill them all. Maybe that was what her slug life was being prolonged for. That and the cold serenity of God's wrath. To die without His forgiveness condemned her soul. But to die without Mary Magna's fouled it per omnia saecula saeculorum. She might have given it freely if Consolata had told her in time, confessed before the old woman's mind faded to singsong. On that last day, Consolata had climbed into the bed behind her and, tossing the pillows on the floor, raised up the feathery body and held it in her arms and between her legs. The small white head nestled between Consolata's breasts, and so the lady had entered death like a birthing, rocked and prayed for by the woman she had kidnapped as a child. Kidnapped three children, actually; the easiest thing in the world in 1925. Mary Magna, a sister, not a mother, then, flatly refused to leave two children in the street garbage they sat in. She simply picked them up, took them to the hospital where she worked and cleaned them in a sequence of Ordorno's Baking Soda, Glover's Mange, soap, alcohol, Blue Ointment, soap, alcohol and then iodine carefully placed on their sores. She dressed them and, with the complicity of the other mission sisters, took them with her to the ship. They were six American nuns on their way back to the States after twelve years of being upstaged by older, sterner Portuguese Orders. Nobody questioned Sisters Devoted to Indian and Colored People paying cut-rate passage for three certainly not white urchins in their charge. For there were three now, Consolata being a last-minute decision because she was already nine years old. By anyone's standard the snatching was a rescue, because whatever life the exasperated, headstrong nun was dragging them to, it would be superior to what lay before them in the shit-strewn paths of that city. When they arrived in Puerto Lim=n, Sister Mary Magna placed two of them in an orphanage, for by then she had fallen in love with Consolata. The green eyes? the tea-colored hair? maybe her docility?

Perhaps her smoky, sundown skin? She took her along as a ward to the post to which the difficult nun was now assigned-an asylum/boarding school for Indian girls in some desolate part of the North American West.

In white letters on a field of blue, a sign near the access road read christ the king school for native girls. Maybe that was what everybody meant to call it, but in Consolata's living memory only the nuns used its proper name-mostly in prayer. Against all reason, the students, the state officials and those they encountered in town called it the Convent.

For thirty years Consolata worked hard to become and remain Mary Magna's pride, one of her singular accomplishments in a lifetime of teaching, nurturing and tending in places with names the nun's own parents had never heard of and could not repeat until their daughter pronounced them. Consolata worshipped her. When she was stolen and taken to the hospital, they stuck needles in her arms to protect her, they said, from diseases. The violent illness that followed she remembered as pleasant, because while she lay in the children's ward a beautiful framed face watched her. It had lake-blue eyes, steady, clear but with a hint of panic behind them, a worry that Consolata had never seen. It was worth getting sick, dying, even, to see that kind of concern in an adult's eyes. Every now and then the woman with the framed face would reach over and touch Consolata's forehead with the backs of her knuckles or smooth her wet, tangled hair. The glass beads hanging from her waist or from her fingers winked. Consolata loved those hands: the flat fingernails, the smooth tough skin of the palm. And she loved the unsmiling mouth, which never needed to show its teeth to radiate happiness or welcome. Consolata could see a cool blue light beaming softly under the habit. It came, she thought, from the heart of her.

Straight from the hospital, Consolata, in a clean brown dress that reached her ankles, accompanied the nuns to a ship called Atenas. After the Panama call they disembarked in New Orleans and from there traveled in an automobile, a train, a bus, another automobile.

And the magic that started with the hospital needles piled up and up: toilets that swirled water clear enough to drink; soft white bread already sliced in its wrapper; milk in glass bottles; and all through the day every day the gorgeous language made especially for talking to heaven. Ora pro nobis gratia plena sanctificetur nomen tuum fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo, et in terra sed libera nos a malo a malo a malo. Only when they arrived at the school did the magic slow. Although the land had nothing to recommend it, the house was like a castle, full of a beauty Mary Magna said had to be eliminated at once. Consolata's first tasks were to smash offending marble figures and tend bonfires of books, crossing herself when naked lovers blew out of the fire and had to be chased back to the flame. Consolata slept in the pantry, scrubbed tile, fed chickens, prayed, peeled, gardened, canned and laundered. It was she, not any of the others, who discovered the wild bush heavy with stinging-hot peppers and who cultivated them. She learned rudimentary cooking skills from Sister Roberta and got good enough to take over the kitchen as well as the garden. She attended classes with the Indian girls but formed no attachments to them.

For thirty years she offered her body and her soul to God's Son and His Mother as completely as if she had taken the veil herself. To her of the bleeding heart and bottomless love. To her quae sine tactu pudoris. To the beata viscera Mariae Virginis. To her whose way was narrow but scented with the sweetness of thyme. To Him whose love was so perfectly available it dumbfounded wise men and the damned. He who had become human so we could know Him touch Him see Him in the littlest ways. Become human so His suffering would mirror ours, that His death throes, His doubt, despair, His failure, would speak for and absorb throughout earthtime what we were vulnerable to. And those thirty years of surrender to the living God cracked like a pullet's egg when she met the living man.

It was 1954. People were building houses, fencing and plowing land, some seventeen miles south of Christ the King. They had begun to build a feed store, a grocery store and, to Mary Magna's delight, a pharmacy closer than ninety miles. There she could purchase the bolts of antiseptic cotton for the girls' menstrual periods, the fine needles, the sixty-weight thread that kept them busy mending, mending, the Lydia Pinkham, the StanBack powder, and the aluminum chloride with which she made deodorant.

On one of these trips, when Consolata accompanied Mary Magna in the school's Mercury station wagon, even before they reached the newly cut road it was clear something was happening. Something unbridled was going on under the scalding sun. They could hear loud cheering, and instead of thirty or so energetic people going quietly about the business of making a town, they saw horses galloping off into yards, down the road, and people screaming with laughter. Small girls with red and purple flowers in their hair were jumping up and down. A boy holding for dear life onto a horse's neck was lifted off and declared winner. Young men and boys swung their hats, chased horses and wiped their brimming eyes. As Consolata watched that reckless joy, she heard a faint but insistent Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. Then a memory of just such skin and just such men, dancing with women in the streets to music beating like an infuriated heart, torsos still, hips making small circles above legs moving so rapidly it was fruitless to decipher how such ease was possible. These men here were not dancing, however; they were laughing, running, calling to each other and to women doubled over in glee. And although they were living here in a hamlet, not in a loud city full of glittering black people, Consolata knew she knew them.

It was some time before Mary Magna could get the pharmacist's attention. Finally he left the crowd and walked them back to his house, where a closed-off part of the front porch served as a shop. He opened the screen door and, politely inclining his head, ushered Mary Magna in. It was while Consolata waited on the steps that she saw him for the first time. Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. A lean young man astride one horse, leading another. His khaki shirt was soaked with sweat, and at some point he removed his wide flat hat to wipe perspiration from his forehead. His hips were rocking in the saddle, back and forth, back and forth. Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. Consolata saw his profile, and the wing of a feathered thing, undead, fluttered in her stomach. He rode on past and disappeared into the feedlot. Mary Magna emerged with her purchases, complaining a little about something or other-the price, the quality-and hurried to the station wagon, Consolata, behind her, carrying blue-tissued rolls of surgical cotton. Just as she opened the passenger door he passed again. On foot, running lightly, eager to return to the festive knot of people farther down the road.

Casually, perfunctorily, he looked her way. Consolata looked back and thought she saw hesitation in his eyes if not in his stride. Quickly she ducked into the sun-baked Mercury, where the heat seemed to explain her difficult breathing. She did not see him again for two months of time made unstable by a feathered thing fighting for wingspread. Months of fervent prayer and extra care taken with chores. Months of tension also, because the school had been enjoined to close. Although the endowment of the wealthy woman who founded and funded the order had survived the thirties, it was depleted by the fifties. The good, sweet Indian girls were long gone-snatched away by their mothers and brothers or graduated into a pious life. For three years now the school had been soliciting wards of the state: impudent girls who clearly thought the sisters were hilarious most of the time, sinister the rest of the time. Two had already run away; only four remained. Unless the sisters could persuade the state to send them (and pay for) more wicked, wayward Indian girls, the orders were to prepare for closure and reassignment. The state had wayward girls, all right, since wayward could mean anything from bedwetting to truancy to stuttering in class, but preferred to place them in Protestant schools, where they could understand the clothes if not the religious behavior of the teachers. Catholic churches and schools in Oklahoma were as rare as fish pockets. Which was why the benefactress had bought the mansion in the first place. It was an opportunity to intervene at the heart of the problem: to bring God and language to natives who were assumed to have neither; to alter their diets, their clothes, their minds; to help them despise everything that had once made their lives worthwhile and to offer them instead the privilege of knowing the one and only God and a chance, thereby, for redemption. Mary Magna wrote letter after letter, traveled to Oklahoma City and beyond, hoping to save the school. In that distracted atmosphere, Consolata's fumbling, dropping some things, scorching others, making rushed, unscheduled visits to the chapel, were nuisances to the sisters but not signs of alarm distinguishable from their own. When asked what the matter was or reprimanded for some intolerable lapse, she invented excuses or sulked.

Looming in her confusion, daily refreshing her hasty piety, was the fear of being asked to step outside the Convent, to shop in the town again. So she did the yard chores at first light and spent the balance of the day inside, mismanaging her work. None of which helped in the end. He came to her.

On a clear summer day, as she knelt weeding in the garden along with two sullen wards of the state, a male voice behind her said: "Excuse me, miss."

All he wanted was some black peppers.

He was twenty-nine. She was thirty-nine. And she lost her mind.

Completely.

Consolata was not a virgin. One of the reasons she so gratefully accepted Mary Magna's hand, stretching over the litter like a dove's wing, was the dirty pokings her ninth year subjected her to. But never, after the white hand had enclosed her filthy paw, did she know any male or want to, which must have been why being love-struck after thirty celibate years took on an edible quality.

What did he say? Come with me? What they call you? How much for half a peck? Or did he just show up the next day for more of the hot black peppers? Did she walk toward him to get a better look? Or did he move toward her? In any case, with something like amazement, he'd said, "Your eyes are like mint leaves." Had she answered "And yours are like the beginning of the world" aloud, or were these words confined to her head? Did she really drop to her knees and encircle his leg, or was that merely what she was wanting to do? "I'll return your basket. But it may be late when I do. Is it all right if I disturb you?"

She didn't remember saying anything to that, but her face surely told him what he needed to know, because he was there in the night and she was there too and he took her hand in his. Not a peck basket in sight. Sha sha sha.

Once in his truck, easing down the graveled driveway, the narrow dirt road, and then gaining speed on a wider tarmac one, they did not speak. He drove, it seemed, for the pleasure of the machine: the roar contained, hooded in steel; the sly way it simultaneously parted the near darkness and vaulted into darkness afar-beyond what could be anticipated. They drove for what Consolata believed were hours, no words passing between them. The danger and its necessity focused them, made them calm. She did not know or care where headed or what might happen when they arrived. Speeding toward the unforeseeable, sitting next to him who was darker than the darkness they split, Consolata let the feathers unfold and come unstuck from the walls of a stone-cold womb. Out here where wind was not a help or threat to sunflowers, nor the moon a language of time, of weather, of sowing or harvesting, but a feature of the original world designed for the two of them.

Finally he slowed and turned into a barely passable track, where coyote grass scraped the fenders. In the middle of it he braked and would have taken her in his arms except she was already there. On the way back they were speechless again. What had been uttered during their lovemaking leaned toward language, gestured its affiliation, but in fact was un-memorable, — controllable or — translatable. Before dawn they pulled away from each other as though, having been arrested, they were each facing prison sentences without parole. As she opened the door and stepped down, he said, "Friday. Noon." Consolata stood there while he backed the truck away. She had not seen him clearly even once during the whole night. But Friday. Noon. They would do it do it do it in daylight. She hugged herself, sank to her knees and doubled over. Her forehead actually tapping the ground as she rocked in a harness of pleasure.

She slipped into the kitchen and pretended to Sister Roberta that she had been in the henhouse.

"Well, then? Where are the eggs?"

"Oh. I forgot the basket."

"Don't go softheaded on me, please."

"No, Sister. I won't."

"Everything is in such disarray."

"Yes, Sister."

"Well, move, then."

"Yes, Sister. Excuse me, Sister."

"Is something funny?"

"No, Sister. Nothing. But…"

"But?"

"I… What is today?"

"Saint Martha."

"I mean what day of the week."

"Tuesday. Why?"

"Nothing, Sister."

"We need your wits, dear. Not your confusion."

"Yes, Sister."

Consolata snatched a basket and ran out the kitchen door. Friday. Noon. The sun has hammered everybody back behind stone walls for relief. Everybody but Consolata and, she hopes, the living man. She has no choice but to bear the heat with only a straw hat to protect her from the anvil the sun takes her for. She is standing at the slight turn in the driveway, but in full view of the house. This land is flat as a hoof, open as a baby's mouth. There is nowhere to hide outrageousness. If Sister Roberta or Mary Magna calls to her or asks for an explanation she will invent something-or nothing. She hears his truck before she sees it and when it arrives it passes her by. He does not turn his head, but he signals. His finger lifts from the steering wheel and points farther ahead. Consolata turns right and follows the sound of his tires and then their silence as they touch tarmac. He waits for her on the shoulder of the road.

Inside the truck they look at one another for a long time, seriously, carefully, and then they smile.

He drives to a burned-out farmhouse that sits on a rise of fallow land. Negotiating bluestem and chickweed, he parks behind the black teeth of a broken chimney. Hand in hand, they fight shrub and bramble until they reach a shallow gully. Consolata spots at once what he wants her to see: two fig trees growing into each other. When they are able to speak full sentences, he gazes at her, saying: "Don't ask me to explain. I can't."

"Nothing to explain."

"I'm trying to get on in my life. A lot of people depend on me."

"I know you're married."

"I aim to stay so."

"I know."

"What else you know?" He puts his forefinger in her navel.

"That I'm way older than you."

He looks up, away from her navel to her eyes, and smiles. "Nobody's older than me."

Consolata laughs.

"Certainly not you," he says. "When's the last time?"

"Before you were born."

"Then you're all mine."

"Oh, yes."

He kisses her lightly, then leans on his elbow. "I've traveled. All over. I've never seen anything like you. How could anything be put together like you? Do you know how beautiful you are? Have you looked at yourself?"

"I'm looking now."

No figs ever appeared on those trees during all the time they met there, but they were grateful for the shade of dusty leaves and the protection of the agonized trunks. The blankets he brought they lay on as much as possible. Later each saw the nicks and bruises the dry creek caused. Consolata was questioned. She refused to answer; diverted the inquiries into lament. "What's going to happen to me when all this is closed? Nobody has said what's going to happen to me."

"Don't be ridiculous. You know we'll take care of you. Always." Consolata pouted, pretending to be wild with worry and therefore unreliable. The more assurance she got, the more she insisted upon wandering off, to "be by myself," she said. An urge that struck her mostly on Fridays. Around noon.

When Mary Magna and Sister Roberta left on business in September, Sister Mary Elizabeth and three, now, feckless students continued to pack, clean, study and maintain prayer. Two of the students, Clarissa and Penny, began to grin when they saw Consolata. They were fourteen years old; small-boned girls with beautiful knowing eyes that could go suddenly blank. They lived to get out of that place, and were in fairly good spirits now that the end was coming.

Recently they had begun to regard Consolata as a confederate rather than one of the enemy out to ruin their lives. And whispering to each other in a language the sisters had forbidden them to use, they covered for her, did the egg gathering that was Consolata's responsibility. The weeding and washing up too. Sometimes they watched from the schoolroom windows, heads touching, eyes aglow, as the woman they believed old enough to be their grandmother stood in all weather waiting for the Chevrolet truck.

"Does anyone know?" Consolata runs her thumbnail around the living man's nipple.

"Wouldn't be surprised," he answers.

"Your wife?"

"No."

"You told somebody?"

"No."

"Someone saw us?"

"Don't think so."

"Then how could anybody know?"

"I have a twin."

Consolata sits up. "There are two of you?"

"No." He closes his eyes. When he opens them he is looking away.

"There's just one of me."

September marched through smearing everything with oil paint: acres of cardamom yellow, burnt orange, miles of sienna, blue ravines both cerulean and midnight, along with heartbreakingly violet skies. When October arrived and gourds were swelling in the places where radishes had been, Mary Magna and Sister Roberta returned, severely irritated by priests, lawyers, clerks and clerics. Their news was no news at all.

Everyone's fate was being resolved in Saint Pere, except her own. That decision would come later. Mary Magna's age, seventy-two, was a consideration, but she refused placement in a quiet home. Also there was the upkeep of the property. The title was in the hands of the benefactress' foundation (which was down to its principal now), so the house and land were not exactly church owned; the argument, therefore, was whether it was subject to current and back taxes. But the real question for the assessor was why in a Protestant state a bevy of strange Catholic women with no male mission to control them was entitled to special treatment. Fortunately or unfortunately, no natural resources had so far been discovered on the land, making it impossible for the foundation to unburden it. They could not simply walk off, could they? Mary Magna called everyone together to explain. Another girl had run away, but the last two, Penny and Clarissa, listened in rapt attention as their future-the next four years of it anyway-which had taken shape in some old man in a suit's hands, was presented to them. They bowed their beautiful heads in solemn acquiescence, certain that the help they needed to get out of the clutch of nuns was on the way. Consolata, however, paid scant attention to Mary Magna's words. She wasn't going anywhere. She would live in the field if she had to, or, better, in the fire-ruined house that had become her mind's home. Three times now she had followed him through it, balancing on buckled floorboards and smelling twelve-year-old smoke. Out there with not even a tree line in view, like a house built on the sand waves of the lonely Sahara, with no one or thing to hinder it, the house had burned freely in the play of wind and its own preen. Had it begun at night, with children asleep? Or was it unoccupied when the flames first seethed? Was the husband sixty acres away, bundling, branding, clearing, sowing? The wife stooped over a washtub in the yard, wisps of hair irritating her forehead? She would have thrown a bucket or two, then, yelling to the children, rushed to collect what she could. Piling everything she could reach, snatch, into the yard. Surely they had a bell, a rusty triangle-something to ring or bang to warn the other of advancing danger. When the husband got there, the smoke would have forced him to cry. But only the smoke, for they were not crying people. He would have worried first about the stock and guided them to safety or set them free, remembering that he had no property insurance. Other than what lay in the yard, all was lost. Even the sunflowers at the northwest corner of the house, near the kitchen, where the wife could see them while stirring hominy.

Consolata ferreted in drawers where field mice had nibbled propane gas receipts. Saw how the wind had smoothed charred furniture to silk. Nether shapes had taken over the space from which humans had fled. A kind of statuary of ash people. A man, eight feet tall, hovered near the fireplace. His legs, sturdy cowboy legs, and the set of his jaw as he faced them answered immediate questions of domain. The finger at the tip of his long black arm pointed left toward sky where a wall had crumbled, demanding quick exit from his premises. Near the pointing man, faintly etched on the ocher wall, was a girl with butterfly wings three feet long. The opposite wall was inhabited by what Consolata thought were fishmen, but the living man said, No, more like Eskimo eyes.

"Eskimo?" she asked, bunching her hair away from her neck.

"What's an Eskimo?"

He laughed and, obeying the cowboy's order, pulled her away, over the rubble of the collapsed wall, back to the gully, where they competed with the fig trees for holding on to one another. Mid-October he skipped a week. A Friday came and Consolata waited for two and a half hours where the dirt road met the tarmac. She would have waited longer, but Penny and Clarissa came and led her away. He must be dead, she thought, and no one to tell her so. All night she fretted-on her pallet in the pantry or hunched in darkness at the kitchen table. Morning found her watching the world of living things dribbling away with his absence. Her heart, clogged with awfulness, weakened. Her veins seemed to have turned into crinkly cellophane tubes. The heaviness in her chest was gaining weight so fast she was unable to breathe properly. Finally she decided to find out or find him. Saturday was a busy day in those parts. The once-a-week bus honked her out of the way as she strode down the middle of the county road. Consolata skittered to the shoulder and kept on, her unbraided hair lifting in the breeze of the tailpipe. A few minutes later an oil truck passed her, its driver yelling something through the window.

Half an hour later there was a glistening in the distance. A car? A truck? Him? Her heart gurgled and began to seep blood back into her cellophane veins. She dared not let the smile growing in her mouth spread to her face. Nor did she dare stop walking while the vehicle came slowly into view. Yes, dear God, a truck. And one person at the wheel, my Jesus. And now it slowed. Consolata turned to watch it come full stop and to feast on the living man's face.

He leaned out of the window, smiling.

"Want a lift?"

Consolata ran across the road and darted around to the passenger door. By the time she got there it was open. She climbed in, and for some reason-a feminine desire to scold or annihilate twenty-four hours of desperation; to pretend, at least, that the suffering he had caused her required an apology, an explanation to win her forgiveness-some instinct like that preserved her and she did not let her hand slip into his crotch as it wanted to.

He was silent, of course. But it was not the silence of the Friday noon pickups. Then the unspeaking was lush with promise. Easy. Vocal. This silence was barren, a muteness lined with acid. And then she noticed the smell. Not unpleasant, not at all, but not his. Consolata froze; then, not daring to look at his face, she glanced sideways at his feet. He was wearing not the black high-tops but cowboy boots, convincing her that a stranger sat behind the steering wheel, inhabiting the body of him, but not him.

She thought to scream, to throw herself out onto the road. She would fight him if he touched her. She had no time to imagine other options, because they were approaching the dirt road that led to the Convent. She was just about to fling open the door, when the stranger braked and slowed to a standstill. He leaned over, brushing her breasts with his arm, and lifted the door handle. She stepped down quickly and turned to see.

He touched the brim of his Stetson, smiling. "Anytime," he said.

"Anytime at all."

She backed away, staring at the exact face of him, repelled by but locked into his eyes, chaste and wide with hatred. The incident does not halt the fig tree meetings. He comes the next Friday wearing the right shoes and exuding the right smell, and they argue a little.

"What did he do?"

"Nothing. He didn't even ask me where I was going. Just drove me back."

"Good thing he did."

"Why?"

"Did us both a favor."

"No, he didn't. He was…"

"What?"

"I don't know."

"What'd he say to you?"

"He said, 'Want a lift?' and then he said, 'Anytime.' Like he'd do it again. I could tell he doesn't like me."

"Probably not. Why should he? You want him to? Like you?"

"No. Oh, no, but."

"But what?"

Consolata sits up straight and looks steadily toward the back of the fire-ruined house. Something brown and furry scurries into what is left of a charred rain barrel.

"You talk to him about me?" she asks.

"Never told him a thing about you."

"Then how did he know I was coming to find you?"

"Maybe he didn't. Maybe he just didn't think you should be walking to town like that."

"He didn't turn the truck around. He was driving north. That's why I thought it was you."

"Look," he says. He squats on his haunches, tossing pebbles. "We have to have a signal. I can't always show up on Fridays. Let's think of something, so you'll know."

They thought of nothing that would work. In the end she told him she would wait the Fridays, but only for an hour. He said, If I'm not on time, I'm not coming at all.

The regularity of their meetings, before his twin showed up, had smoothed her hunger to a blunt blade. Now irregularity knifed it. Even so, twice more he carried her off to the place where fig trees insisted on life. She did not know it then, but the second time was the last.

It is the end of October. He walls a portion of the fire-ruined house with a horse blanket, and they lie on an army-issue bedroll. The pale sky above them is ringed with a darkness coming, which they could not have seen had they looked. So the falling snow that lights her hair and cools his wet back surprises them. Later they speak of their situation. Blocked by weather and circumstance, they talk, mostly, about Where. He mentions a town ninety miles north but corrects himself quickly, because no motel or hotel would take them. She suggests the Convent because of the hiding places in it everywhere. He snorts his displeasure.

"Listen," she whispers. "There is a small room in the cellar. No. Wait, just listen. I will fix it, make it beautiful. With candles. It's cool and dark in the summer, warm as coffee in winter. We'll have a lamp to see each other with, but nobody can see us. We can shout as loud as we want and nobody can hear. Pears are down there and walls of wine. The bottles sleep on their sides, and each one has a name, like Veuve Clicquot or MTdoc, and a number: 1-9-1-5 or 1-9-2-6, like prisoners waiting to be freed. Do it," she urges him. "Please do it. Come to my house."

While he considers, her mind races ahead with plans. Plans to cram rosemary into the pillow slips; rinse linen sheets in hot water steeped in cinnamon. They will slake their thirst with the prisoner wine, she tells him. He laughs a low, satisfied laugh and she bites his lip which, in retrospect, was her big mistake.

Consolata did all of it and more. The cellar room sparkled in the light of an eight-holder candelabra from Holland and reeked of ancient herbs. Seckel pears crowded a white bowl. None of which pleased him for he never arrived. Never felt the slide of old linen on his skin, or picked flakes of stick cinnamon from her hair. The two wineglasses she rescued from straw-filled crates and polished to abnormal clarity collected dust particles, then, by November, just before Thanksgiving, an industrious spider moved in.

Penny and Clarissa had washed their hair and sat by the stove, finger-combing it dry. Every now and then one of them would lean and shake a shiny black panel of it closer to the heat. Softly singing forbidden Algonquian lullabies, they watched Consolata just as they always did: her days of excitement, of manic energy; her slow change to nail-biting distraction. They liked her because she was stolen, as they had been, and felt sorry for her too. They regarded her behavior as serious instruction about the limits and possibilities of love and imprisonment, and took the lesson with them for the balance of their lives. Now, however, their instant future claimed priority. Bags packed, plans set, they needed only money.

"Where do you keep the money, Consolata? Please, Consolata. Wednesday they take us to the Correctional. Just a little, Consolata. In the pantry, yes? Well, where? There was one dollar and twenty cents from Monday alone."

Consolata ignored them. "Stop pestering me."

"We helped you, Consolata. Now you must help us. It's not stealing-we worked hard here. Please? Think how hard we worked." Their voices chanting, soothing, they swayed their hair and looked at her with the glorious eyes of maidens in peril.

The knock on the kitchen door was not loud, but its confidence was unmistakable. Three taps. No more. The girls stilled their hair in their hands. Consolata rose from her chair as if summoned by the sheriff or an angel. In a way it was both, in the shape of a young woman, exhausted, breathing hard but ramrod straight. "That's some walk," she said. "Please. Let me sit."

Penny and Clarissa disappeared like smoke.

The young woman took the chair Penny had vacated.

"Can I get you something?" asked Consolata.

"Water, would you?"

"Not tea? You look froze."

"Yes. But water first. Then some tea."

Consolat a poured water from a pitcher and bent to check the stove fire.

"What's that smell?" asked the visitor. "Sage?"

Consolata nodded. The woman covered her lips with her fingers.

"Does it bother you?"

"It'll pass. Thank you." She drank the water slowly until the glass was empty.

Consolata knew, or thought she did, but asked anyway. "What is it you want?"

"Your help." Her voice was soft, noncommittal. No judgment, no pleading.

"I can't help you."

"You can if you want to."

"What kind of help are you looking for?"

"I can't have this child."

Hot water splashed from the spout to the saucer. Consolata put down the kettle and sopped the water with a towel. She had never seen the woman-girl really, not out of her twenties-but there was no confusion from the moment she stepped inside about who she was. His scent was all over her, or hers was all over him. They had lived together close enough long enough to breathe phlox and Camay soap and tobacco and to exhale it in their wake. That and some other thing: the scent of small children, the lovely aroma of sweet oil, baby powder and a meatless diet. This was a mother here, saying a brute unmotherly thing that rushed at Consolata like a forked tongue. She dodged the tongue, but the toxin behind it shocked her with what she had known but never imagined: she was sharing him with his wife. Now she saw the pictures that represented exactly what that word-sharing-meant.

"I can't help you with that! What's wrong with you?"

"I've had two children in two years. If I have another…"

"Why come to me? Why you asking me?"

"Who else?" asked the woman, in her clear, matter-of-fact voice.

The poison spread. Consolata had lost him. Completely. Forever. His wife might not know it, but Consolata remembered his face. Not when she bit his lip, but when she had hummed over the blood she licked from it. He'd sucked air sharply. Said, "Don't ever do that again." But his eyes, first startled, then revolted, had said the rest of what she should have known right away. Clover, cinnamon, soft old linen-who would chance pears and a wall of prisoner wine with a woman bent on eating him like a meal?

"You get on out of here. You didn't come here for that. You came to tell me, show me, what you're like. And you think I'll stop when I know what you're willing to do. Well, I won't."

"No, but he will."

"You wouldn't have come here if you thought so. You want to see what I'm like; if I'm pregnant too."

"Listen to me. He can't fail at what he is doing. None of us can.

We are making something."

"What do I care about your raggedy little town? Get out. Go on.

I have work to do."

Did she walk all the way home? Or was that a lie too? Was her car parked somewhere near? Or if she did walk, did nobody pick her up? Is that why she lost the baby?

Her name was Soane, and when she and Consolata became fast friends, Soane told her she didn't think so. It was the evil in her heart that caused it. Arrogance dripping with self-righteousness, she said. Pretending a sacrifice she had no intention of making taught her not to fool with God's ways. The life she offered as a bargain fell between her legs in a swamp of red fluids and windblown sheets. Their friendship was some time coming. In the meanwhile, after the woman left, Consolata threw a cloth bag of coins at Penny and Clarissa, shouting, "Get out of my face!"

While the light changed and the meals did too, the next few days were one long siege of sorrow, during which Consolata picked through the scraps of her gobble-gobble love. Romance stretched to the breaking point broke, exposing a simple mindless transfer. From Christ, to whom one gave total surrender and then swallowed the idea of His flesh, to a living man. Shame. Shame without blame. Consolata virtually crawled back to the little chapel (wishing fervently that He could be there, glowing red in the dim light). Scuttled back, as women do, as into arms understanding where the body, like a muscle spasm, has no memory of its cringe. No beseeching prayer emerged. No Domine, non sum dignus. She simply bent the knees she had been so happy to open and said, "Dear Lord, I didn't want to eat him. I just wanted to go home."

Mary Magna came into the chapel and, kneeling with her, put an arm around Consolata's shoulder, saying, "At last."

"You don't know," said Consolata.

"I don't need to, child."

"But he, but he." Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha, she wanted to say, meaning, he and I are the same.

"Sh sh sh. Sh sh sh," said Mary Magna. "Never speak of him again."

She might not have agreed so quickly, but as Mary Magna led her out of the chapel into the schoolroom, a sunshot seared her right eye, announcing the beginning of her bat vision, and she began to see best in the dark. Consolata had been spoken to.

Mary Magna spent money she could not afford to take the household on a trip to Middleton, where each of them, but especially Consolata, confessed and attended mass. Clarissa and Penny, models of penitence, urged without success a visit to the Indian and Western Museum advertised on the road. Sister Mary Elizabeth said it was an unwise way to spend post-confessional time. The long ride back was silent except for the shish of missal pages turning and occasional humming from the last of the school's clientele.

Soon only Mother and Sister Roberta were left. Sister Mary Elizabeth accepted a teaching post in Indiana. Penny and Clarissa had been taken east and, as was later learned, escaped from the bus one night in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Except for a money order, made out to Consolata and signed with a storybook name, they were never heard from again.

The three women spent the winter waiting, then not waiting, for some alternative to retirement or a "home." The independence the mission was designed for was beginning to feel like abandonment.

Meanwhile they took steps to keep up the property and not incur debt the foundation could not meet. Sargeant Person agreed to lease land from them for rough corn and alfalfa. They made sauces and jellies and European bread. Sold eggs, peppers, hot relish and angry barbecue sauce, which they advertised on a square of cardboard covering the faded blue and white name of the school. Most of their customers in 1955 drove trucks between Arkansas and Texas. Ruby citizens seldom stopped to buy anything other than peppers, since they were supreme cooks themselves and made or grew what they wanted. Only in the sixties, when times were fat, did they join the truckers and look upon what they called Convent-bred chickens as superior enough to their own to be worth a journey. Then they would also try a little jalape+-o jelly, or a corn relish. Pecan saplings planted in the forties were strong in 1960. The Convent sold the nuts, and when pies from the harvest were made, they went as soon as posted. They made rhubarb pie so delicious it made customers babble, and the barbecue sauce got a heavenly reputation based on the hellfire peppers. It was an all-right life for Consolata. Better than all right, for Mary Magna had taught her patience as the first order of business. After arranging for her confirmation, she had taken the young Consolata aside and together they would watch coffee brew or sit in silence at the edge of the garden. God's generosity, she said, is nowhere better seen than in the gift of patience. The lesson held Consolata in good stead, and she hardly noticed the things she was losing. The first to go were the rudiments of her first language. Every now and then she found herself speaking and thinking in that in-between place, the valley between the regulations of the first language and the vocabulary of the second. The next thing to disappear was embarrassment. Finally she lost the ability to bear light. By the time Mavis arrived, Sister Roberta had gone into a nursing home and Consolata had nothing on her mind but the care of Mary Magna.

But before that, before the disheveled woman in thong slippers hollered at the edge of the garden, before Mary Magna's illness, still in a state of devotion and light-blindness, and ten years after that summer of hiding in a gully behind a house full of inhospitable ash people, Consolata was tricked into raising the dead.

They were subdued years. Penance attended to but not allconsuming. There was time and mind for everyday things. Consolata learned to manage any and every thing that did not require paper: she perfected the barbecue sauce that drove cattle-country people wild; quarreled with the chickens; gave hateful geese a wide berth; and tended the garden. She and Sister Roberta had agreed to try again for a cow and Consolata was standing in the garden, wondering where to pen it, when sweat began to pour from her neck, her hairline, like rain.

So much it clouded the sunglasses she now wore. She removed the glasses to wipe the sweat from her eyes. Through that salty water she saw a shadow moving toward her. When it got close it turned into a small woman. Consolata, overcome with dizziness, tried to hold on to a bean pole, failed and sank to the ground. When she woke, she was sitting in the red chair, the small woman humming while mopping her forehead.

"Talk about luck," she said, and smiled around a wad of chewing gum.

"What's happening to me?" Consolata looked toward the house.

"Change, I expect. Here's your glasses. Bent, though." Her name was Lone DuPres, she said, and if she had not come for a few peppers, she said, who knew how long Consolata would have lain in the snap beans.

Consolata found herself too weak to stand, so she let her head fall back on the chair's crown and asked for water.

"Uh uh," said Lone. "You already got too much of that. How old are you?"

"Forty-nine. Fifty soon."

"Well, I'm over seventy and I know my stuff. You do as I say, your change will be easier and shorter."

"You don't know that's what this is."

"Bet on it. And it's not just the sweat. You feel something more, don't you?"

"Like what?"

"You'd know it if you had it."

"What's it feel like?"

"You tell me. Some women can't stomach it. Others say it reminds them of, well, you know."

"My throat is parched," said Consolata.

Lone dug around in her bag. "I'll brew you something to help."

"No. The sisters. I mean, they won't like. Won't let you just walk on in and start messing on the stove."

"Oh, they'll be fine."

And they were. Lone gave Consolata a hot drink that tasted of pure salt. When she described her spell and Lone's remedy to Mary Magna she laughed, saying, "Well, the teacher I am thinks 'baloney.'

The woman I am thinks anything that helps, helps. But be very careful."

Mary Magna lowered her voice. "I think she practices." Lone didn't visit often, but when she did she gave Consolata information that made her uneasy. Consolata complained that she did not believe in magic; that the church and everything holy forbade its claims to knowingness and its practice. Lone wasn't aggressive. She simply said, "Sometimes folks need more."

"Never," said Consolata. "In my faith, faith is all I need."

"You need what we all need: earth, air, water. Don't separate God from His elements. He created it all. You stuck on dividing Him from His works. Don't unbalance His world."

Consolata listened halfheartedly. Her curiosity was mild; her religious habits entrenched. Her safety did not lie in the fall of a broom or the droppings of a coyote. Her happiness was not increased or decreased by the sight of a malformed animal. She fancied no conversation with water. Nor did she believe that ordinary folk could or should interfere with natural consequences. The road from Demby, however, was straight as a saw, and a teenager driving it for the first time believed not only that he could drive it blindfolded but that he could drive it in his sleep, which is what Scout Morgan was doing, off and on, as he traveled early one evening the road that passed the Convent. He was fifteen years old, driving his best friend's father's truck (which was nothing compared to the Little Deere his uncle taught him to handle), while his brother, Easter, slept in the truck bed and the best friend slept at his side. They had sneaked off to Red Fork to see the Black Rodeo all their fathers forbade them to attend and had drunk themselves happy with Falstaff beer. During one of Scout's involuntary naps at the wheel, the truck careened off the road and probably would have done no serious damage but for the roadside poles stacked and ready to go as soon as the power crew was empowered to install them. The truck hit the poles and flipped. July Person and Easter were thrown out. Scout was stuck inside, crooked red lines highlighting the black skin of his temple.

Lone, sitting at Consolata's table, sensed rather than heard the accident: the shouts of July and Easter could not have traveled that far.

She rose and grabbed Consolata's arm.

"Come on!"

"Where to?"

"Close by, I think."

When they arrived, Easter and July had pulled Scout from the cab and were howling over his dead body. Lone turned to Consolata, saying, "I'm too old now. Can't do it anymore, but you can."

"Lift him?"

"No. Go inside him. Wake him up."

"Inside? How?"

"Step in. Just step on in. Help him, girl!"

Consolata looked at the body and without hesitation removed her glasses and focused on the trickles of red discoloring his hair. She stepped in. Saw the stretch of road he had dreamed through, felt the flip of the truck, the headache, the chest pressure, the unwillingness to breathe. As from a distance she heard Easter and July kicking the truck and moaning. Inside the boy she saw a pinpoint of light receding. Pulling up energy that felt like fear, she stared at it until it widened. Then more, more, so air could come seeping, at first, then rushing rushing in. Although it hurt like the devil to look at it, she concentrated as though the lungs in need were her own.

Scout opened his eyes, groaned and sat up. The women told the unhurt boys to carry him back to the Convent. They hesitated, exchanging looks. Lone shouted, "What the hell is the matter with you all?"

Both were profoundly relieved by Scout's recovery, but, No, m'am, Miss DuPres, they said, we got to get on home. "Let's see if it still runs," said Easter. They righted the truck and found it sound enough to drive. Lone went with them, leaving Consolata half exhilarated by and half ashamed of what she had done. Practiced. Weeks passed before Lone returned to put her mind at ease about the boy's recovery.

"You gifted. I knew it from the start."

Consolata turned her lips down and crossed herself, whispering, "Ave Maria, gratia plena." The exhilaration was gone now, and the thing seemed nasty to her. Like devilment. Like evil craft. Something it would mortify her to tell Mary Magna, Jesus or the Virgin. She hadn't known what she was doing; she was under a spell. Lone's spell. And told her so.

"Don't be a fool. God don't make mistakes. Despising His gift, now, that is a mistake. You calling Him a fool, like you?"

"I don't understand anything you're saying," Consolata told her. "Yes you do. Let your mind grow long and use what God gives you."

"I think He wants me to ignore you."

"Hardhead," said Lone. She hoisted her bag and walked down the driveway to wait in the sun for her ride.

Then Soane came, saying, "Lone DuPres told me what you did. I came to thank you with all my heart."

She looked much the same to Consolata, except that the long hair of 1954, sticky with distress, was cut now. She carried a basket and placed it on the table. "You will be in my prayers forever." Consolata lifted the napkin. Round sugar cookies were layered between waxed paper. "Mother will like these with her tea," she said. Then, looking at Soane, "Go nice with coffee too."

"I'd love a cup. More than anything."

Consolata placed the sugar cookies on a platter. "Lone thinks-"

"I don't care about that. You gave him back to me." A gander screamed in the yard, scattering the geese before him.

"I didn't know he belonged to you."

"I know you didn't."

"And it was something I couldn't help doing. I mean it was out of my hands, so to speak."

"I know that too."

"What does he think?"

"He thinks he saved himself."

"Maybe he's right."

"Maybe he is."

"What do you think?"

"That he was lucky to have us both."

Consolata shook crumbs from the basket and folded the napkin neatly inside. They traded that basket back and forth for years. Other than with Mary Magna, "stepping in" was of no use. There was no call for it. The light Consolata could not bear to approach her own eyes, she endured for the Reverend Mother when she became ill. At first she tried it out of the weakness of devotion turned to panic-nothing seemed to relieve the sick woman-then, angered by helplessness, she assumed an attitude of command. Stepping in to find the pinpoint of light. Manipulating it, widening it, strengthening it. Reviving, even raising, her from time to time. And so intense were the steppings in, Mary Magna glowed like a lamp till her very last breath in Consolata's arms. So she had practiced, and although it was for the benefit of the woman she loved, she knew it was anathema, that Mary Magna would have recoiled in disgust and fury knowing her life was prolonged by evil. That the bliss of that final entrance was being deliberately delayed by one who ought to know better. So Consolata never told her. Yet, however repugnant, the gift did not evaporate. Troubling as it was, yoking the sin of pride to witchcraft, she came to terms with it in a way she persuaded herself would not offend Him or place her soul in peril. It was a question of language. Lone called it "stepping in." Consolata said it was "seeing in." Thus the gift was "in sight." Something God made free to anyone who wanted to develop it. It was devious but it settled the argument between herself and Lone and made it possible for her to accept Lone's remedies for all sorts of ills and to experiment with others while the "in sight" blazed away. The dimmer the visible world, the more dazzling her "in sight" became.

When Mary Magna died, Consolata, fifty-four years old, was orphaned in a way she was not as a street baby and was never as a servant. There was reason the Church cautioned against excessive human love and when Mary Magna left her, Consolata accepted the sympathy of her two friends, the help and murmurs of support from Mavis, the efforts to cheer her from Grace, but her rope to the world had slid from her fingers. She had no identification, no insurance, no family, no work. Facing extinction, waiting to be evicted, wary of God, she felt like a curl of paper-nothing written on it-lying in the corner of an empty closet. They had promised to take care of her always but did not tell her that always was not all ways nor forever. Prisoner wine helped until it didn't and she found herself, full of a drinker's malice, wishing she had the strength to beat the life out of the women freeloading in the house. "God don't make mistakes," Lone had shouted at her. Perhaps not, but He was sometimes overgenerous. Like giving satanic gifts to a drunken, ignorant, penniless woman living in darkness unable to rise from a cot to do something useful or die on it and rid the world of her stench. Gray-haired, her eyes drained of what eyes were made for, she imagined how she must appear. Her colorless eyes saw nothing clearly except what took place in the minds of others. Exactly the opposite of that blind season when she rutted in dirt with the living man and thought she was seeing for the first time because she was looking so hard. But she had been spoken to, half cursed, half blessed. He had burned the green away and replaced it with pure sight that damned her if she used it.

Footsteps, then a knock, interrupted her sad, dead-end thoughts.

The girl opened the door.

"Connie?"

"Who else?"

"It's me, Pallas. I called my father again. So. You know. He's meeting me in Tulsa. I came to say goodbye."

"I see."

"It's been great. I needed to. Well, it's been forever since I last saw him."

"That long?"

"Can you believe it?"

"Hard to. You've fattened up."

"Yeah. I know."

"What will you do about it?"

"Same as always. Diet."

"I don't mean that. I mean the baby. You're pregnant."

"I am not."

"No?"

"No!"

"Why not?"

"I'm only sixteen!"

"Oh," said Consolata, looking at the moon head floating above a spine, the four little appendages-paws or hands or hooves or feet. Hard to tell at that stage. Pallas could be carrying a lamb, a baby, a jaguar. "Pity," she said as Pallas fled from the room. And "pity" again as she imagined the child's probable life with its silly young mother. She remembered another girl, about the same age, who had come a few years ago-at a very bad time. For seventeen days Consolata had been inside, alone, keeping Mary Magna's breath coming and going, the cool blue light flickering until Mary Magna asked permission to go, bereft though she was of the last sacrament. The second girl, Grace, had arrived in time to hold off the fearful loneliness that dropped the moment the body was removed, letting Consolata sleep. Mavis had just returned with Lourdes water and illegal painkillers. Consolata welcomed the company which distracted her from selfpitying thoughts of eviction, starvation and an uncontrite death. Minus papers or patron she was as vulnerable as she had been at nine when she clung to Mary Magna's hand at the railing of the Atenas. Whatever help Lone DuPres or Soane might offer could not include shelter. Not in that town.

Then the girl from Ruby came. A cup of tears just behind her eyes. And something else. She was not anxious, as might have been expected, but revolted by the work of her womb. A revulsion so severe it cut mind from body and saw its flesh-producing flesh as foreign, rebellious, unnatural, diseased. Consolata could not fathom what brought on that repugnance, but there it was. And here it was again in the No! shout of another one: a terror without alloy. With the first one Consolata did what she knew Mary Magna would have done: quieted the girl and advised her to wait her time. Told her that she was welcome to deliver there if she wanted to. Mavis was jubilant, Grace amused. They took the field rent and drove off to shop for the expected newborn, returning with booties and diapers and dolls enough for a kindergarten. The girl, sharp in her refusal to have the midwife attend her, waited quietly sullen for a week or so. Or so Consolata thought.

What she did not know until labor began was that the young mother had been hitting her stomach relentlessly. Had Consolata's eyesight been better and had the girl's skin not been black as an ocean lover's night, she would have seen the bruises at once. As it was, she saw swellings and wide areas where the skin showed purple underneath, rather than silver. But the real damage was the mop handle inserted with a rapist's skill-mercilessly, repeatedly-between her legs. With the gusto and intention of a rabid male, she had tried to bash the life out of her life. And, in a way, was triumphantly successful. The five- or six-month baby revolted. Feisty, outraged, rigid with fright, it tried to escape the battering and battered ship that carried it. The blows to its delicate skull, the trouncing its hind parts took. The shudders in its spine. Otherwise there was no hope. Had it not tried to rescue itself, it would break into pieces or drown in its mother's food. So he was born, in a manner of speaking, too soon and fatigued by the flight. But breathing. Sort of. Mavis took over. Grace went to bed. Together Consolata and Mavis cleaned his eyes, stuck their fingers in his throat, clearing it for air, and tried to feed him. It worked for a few days, then he surrendered himself to the company of Merle and Pearl. By that time the mother was gone, having never touched, glanced at, inquired after or named him. Grace called him Che and Consolata did not know to this day where he was buried. Only that she had murmured Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis over the three pounds of gallant but defeated life before Mavis, smiling and cooing, carried it away.

Just as well, thought Consolata. Life with that mother would have been hell for Che. Now here was another one screaming No! as if that made it so. Pity.

Reaching for a bottle, Consolata found it empty. She sighed and sat back in the chair. Without wine her thoughts, she knew, would be unbearable: resignation, self-pity, muted rage, disgust and shame glowing like cinders in a dying fire. As she rose to replenish her vice, a grand weariness took her, forcing her back to the seat, tipping her chin on her chest. She slept herself into sobriety. Headachy, sandymouthed she woke in quick need of a toilet. On the second floor, she could hear sniffles behind one door, singing behind another. Back down the stairs, she decided to catch a little air and shuffled into the kitchen and out the door. The sun had gone leaving behind a friendlier light. Consolata surveyed the winter-plagued garden. Tomato vines hung limp over fallen fruit, black and smashed in the dirt. Mustards were pale yellow with rot and inattention. A whole spill of melons caved in on themselves near heads of chrysanthemums stricken mud brown. A few chicken feathers were stuck to the low wire fencing protecting the garden from whatever it could. Without human help, gopher holes, termite castles, evidence of rabbit forays and determined crows abounded. The corn scrabble in neatly harvested fields beyond looked forlorn. And the pepper bushes, held on to by the wrinkled fingers of their yield, were rigid with cold. Despite the grains of soil blowing against her legs, Consolata sat down in the faded red chair. "Non sum dignus," she whispered. "But tell me. Where is the rest of days, the aisle of thyme, the scent of veronica you promised? The cream and honey you said I had earned? The happiness that comes of well-done chores, the serenity duty grants us, the blessings of good works? Was what I did for love of you so terrible?" Mary Magna had nothing to say. Consolata listened to the refusing silence, more wondering than annoyed by the sky, in plumage now, gold and blue-green, strutting like requited love on the horizon. She was afraid of dying alone, ungrieved in unholy ground, but knew that was precisely what lay before her. How she longed for the good death. "I'll miss You," she told Him. "I really will." The skylight wavered.

A man approached. Medium height, light step, he came right on up the drive. He wore a cowboy hat that hid his features, but Consolata couldn't have seen them anyway. Where he sat on the kitchen steps, framed by the door, a triangle of shadow obscured his face but not his clothes: a green vest over a white shirt, red suspenders hanging low on either side of his tan trousers, shiny black work shoes. "Who is that?" she asked.

"Come on, girl. You know me." He leaned forward, and she saw that he wore sunglasses-the mirror type that glitter. "No," she said. "Can't say I do."

"Well, not important. I'm traveling here." There were ten yards between them, but his words licked her cheek.

"You from the town?"

"Uh uh. I'm far country. Got a thing to drink?"

"Look you in the house." Consolata was beginning to slide toward his language like honey oozing from a comb.

"Oh, well," he said, as though that settled it and he would rather go thirsty.

"Just holler," said Consolata. "The girls can bring you something." She felt light, weightless, as though she could move, if she wanted to, without standing up.

"Don't you know me better than that?" the man asked. "I don't want see your girls. I want see you."

Consolata laughed. "You have your glasses much more me." Suddenly he was next to her without having moved-smiling like he was having (or expecting) such a good time. Consolata laughed again. It seemed so funny, comical really, the way he had flitted over to her from the steps and how he was looking at her-flirtatious, full of secret fun. Not six inches from her face, he removed his tall hat. Fresh, tea-colored hair came tumbling down, cascading over his shoulders and down his back. He took off his glasses then and winked, a slow seductive movement of a lid. His eyes, she saw, were as round and green as new apples.

In candlelight on a bitter January evening, Consolata cleans, washes and washes again two freshly killed hens. They are young, poor layers with pinfeathers difficult to extract. Their hearts, necks, giblets and livers turn slowly in boiling water. She lifts the skin to reach under it, fingering as far as she can. Under the breast, she searches for a pocket close to the wing. Then, holding the breast in her left palm, the fingers of her right tunnel the back skin, gently pushing for the spine. Into all these places-where the skin has been loosened and the membrane separated from the flesh it once protected-she slides butter. Thick.

Pale. Slippery.

Pallas wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand and then blew her nose. Now what?

This latest phone call, which she had mentioned to Connie, was not very different from the initial one. Just shorter. But it produced the same frustration as what had passed for conversation with her father last summer.

Jesus Christ where the hell are you? We thought you were dead.

Thank God. They found the car but it's bashed to hell on one side and somebody stripped it. You okay? Oh, baby. Daddy. Where is he-boy is his ass over. Tell me what happened. Your bitch mother's not making any sense as usual. Did he hurt you? Daddy, no. Well, what? Was he alone? We're suing the school, baby. Got them by the short hairs. It wasn't him. Some boys chased me. What? In their truck. They hit my car and forced me off the road. I ran and then- They rape you? Daddy!

Hold on sweetheart. Jo Anne get me that detective guy. Tell him I got Pallas. No, she's okay, just get him, will you? Go ahead, baby. I'm Where are you? Will you come and get me Daddy? Of course I will. Right away. Do you need money? Can you get to an airport, a train station? Just tell me where you'll be. Wait. Maybe you should call the police. The local ones I mean. They can get you to an airport. Tell them to call me. No. You call me from the station. Where are you? Pallas? Where you calling from? Pallas, you there? Minnesota. Minnesota? Jesus. I thought you were in New Mexico. What the hell's up there? Bloomington? No, Saint Paul. Are you near Saint Paul, sweetheart?

I'm not near anything, Daddy. It's like country. Call the police, Pallas. Make them come get you, you hear? Okay, Daddy. Then call me from the station. Okay. You got that? You're not hurt or anything? No Daddy. Good. Okay, now. I'll be right here or Jo Anne will if I go out. Boy what you put me through. But everything's going to be okay now. We'll talk about that asshole when you get back. Okay, now? Call me. We have to talk. Love you, baby.

Talk. Sure. Pallas didn't call anybody-police, Dee Dee, or him-until August. He was furious but wired her traveling money all the same.

If they had laughed behind her back before Carlos, if they had joked at her expense then, it came to her only as pale sensation: a broken gesture upon entering study hall; an eye slide as she turned away from her locker; an unstable smile as she joined a crowded lunch table. She had never been truly popular, but her address and her father's money hid the fact. Now she was an open joke (Pallas Truelove ran off with the jaaa-ni-tor don't you love it?) that no one tried to hide. She was back in that place where final wars are waged, the organized trenches of high school, where shame is the plate-shifting time it takes to walk down the hall, failure is a fumble with the combination lock and loathing is a condom wafer clogging a fountain. Where aside from the exchange of clothes and toys, there are no good intentions. Where smugness reigns, judgments instant, dismissals permanent. And the adults haven't a clue. Only prison could be as blatant and as frightening, for beneath its rules and rituals scratched a life of gnawing violence. Those who came from peaceful well-regulated homes were overtaken by a cruelty that visited them as soon as they entered the gates. Cruelty decked out in juvenile glee.

Pallas tried. But the humiliation wore her down. Milton pumped her about her mother. He had been warned about the consequences of marrying outside his own people, and every warning had come true: Dee Dee was irresponsible, amoral; a slut if the truth be told. Pallas was vague, noncommittal in her answers. He was still pursuing a lawsuit against the school for its lax and endangering environment, not to speak of its criminally inclined employees. But the "victim" of the "abduction" had gone willingly; and the destination of the "across state lines" journey was the "victim's" own mother. How criminal could that be? Was there something going on in the father's home they should know about? Something that made the daughter want to, eager to, escape to her mother? Furthermore, nothing untoward had happened on school grounds-except the repair of the "victim's" car and safe guidance home. Also the "abduction" took place during the holiday when the school was closed. Moreover, the "victim" had not only gone willingly, she had cooperated and deceived to voluntarily accompany a man (an artist, even) who had no priors and whose demeanor and work at the high school was exemplary. Had she been assaulted by him sexually? The "victim" said No, no, no, no. Did he drug her, give her something illegal to smoke? Pallas shook her head no, remembering that it was her mother who did that. Who were these people who hit your car? I don't know. I never saw their faces. I got out of there. Where to? I hitched and some people took me in. Who? Some people. In a church kind of place. In Minnesota? No, Oklahoma. What's the address, phone number? Daddy, give it up. I'm home, okay? Yeah but I don't want to have to worry about you. Don't. Don't. Pallas didn't feel well. Everything she ate added a pound in spite of the fact that she threw most of it up. Thanksgiving she spent alone, with food Providence had prepared. Christmas she begged relief. Milton said No. You stay right here. Just Chicago, she said, to visit his sister. He agreed, finally, and his executive secretary made the arrangements. Pallas stayed with her aunt till December 30, when she took off (leaving a reassuringly misleading note). At the Tulsa airport, it took two and a half hours to hire a car and driver to take her all the way to the Convent. Just a visit, she said. Just to find out how everybody was, she said. And who, besides herself, she could fool. Nobody apparently. Connie glimpsed in an instant. Now what?

Consolata tilts the fowl and peers into their silver and rose cavities. She tosses in salt and scours it all around, then rubs the outer skin with a cinnamon and butter mixture. Onion is added to the bits of neck meat, hearts and giblets speckling the broth. As soon as the hens are roasted brown enough and tender she sets them aside so they can reclaim their liquids.

Lukewarm and shallow, the tub water rose only to her waist. Gigi liked it deep, hot, heavy with bubbles. The plumbing in the mansion was breaking up: producing colored water, heaving and sometimes failing to rise to the second floor. The well water passed through a wood-fed boiler nobody other than herself was interested in preserving. She was an habitual nuisance, trying to accumulate gallons of piping-hot water from a decrepit system that was worse than ever in winter. Seneca, of course, had helped out, bringing several pails of steamy water from the kitchen stove to the bathroom. For bubbles she poured in grains of Ivory Snow and whipped the water up as best she could, although the result was a disappointing slime. She had asked Seneca to join her in the tub, got the usual refusal, and although she understood why her friend preferred not to be seen naked, Gigi couldn't resist teasing her about the infrequency of her bathing. The bloody toilet tissue she had seen, but the ridges on Seneca's skin had only been felt under the covers. Blunt and obnoxious as she could be, Gigi could not ask her about them. The answer might come too close to the bleeding black boy scene.

She stretched her legs out and lifted her feet to admire them, as she had done many times when she ran them up K. D. 's spine while she lay in the loft and he sat with his naked back to her. She missed him, now and then. His chaotic devotion, full of moods and hurts and yearning and lots and lots of giving in. Well, she had dogged him a bit. Enjoyed his availability and adoration because she had so little experience of either. Mikey. Nobody could call that love. But K. D.'s version didn't stay fun for long. She had teased, insulted or refused him once too often, and he chased her around the house, grabbed her, smacked her. Mavis and Seneca had pulled him off, used kitchen equipment on him and got him out of there-all three of them answering his curses with better ones of their own.

Ah, well. This is a new year, she thought. Nineteen seventy-five. New plans, since the old ones had turned out to be trash. When she finally got the box out of the bathroom tile, she whooped to find it full of certificates. The bank officer was tickled, too, and offered her twenty-five dollars for the pleasure of framing them or putting them in a display case for the amusement of his customers. Not every day you could see documentation of one of the biggest scams in the West. She held out for fifty dollars and stomped out of the bank ordering Mavis to just drive, please.

She would make Seneca leave with her. For good this time. Get back in the fray. Somehow. Somewhere. Her mother was unlocatable; her father on death row. Only a grandfather left, in a spiffy trailer in Alcorn, Mississippi. She had not thought about it too carefully, but now she wondered exactly why she had left. The fray, that is. It wasn't just the bleeding boy or Mikey's trick about the couple making out in the desert or the short guy's advice about clear water and entwined trees. Before Mikey, the point of it all was lost to entertainment and adventure. Provocative demonstrations, pamphlets, bickering, police, squatters, leaders and talking, talking, so much talk. None of it was serious. Gigi lifted soapy hands to reclasp a roller in her hair. Neither a high school nor a college student, no one, not even the other girls, took her seriousness seriously. If she hadn't been able to print, no one would have known she was there. Except Mikey. "Bastards," she said aloud. And then, not knowing which of the bastards infuriated her most, she slapped the awful bathwater, hissing "Shit!" with each stroke. It calmed her after a while, enough for her to lean back in the tub, cover her face and whisper into her dripping wet palms, "No, you stupid, stupid bitch. Because you weren't tough enough. Smart enough. Like with every other goddamn thing you got no staying power. You thought it was going to be fun and that it would work. In a season or two. You thought we were hot lava and when they broke us down into sand, you ran."

Gigi was not the crying type; even now, when she realized she had not approved of herself in a long, long time, her eyes were desertskull dry.

Consolata is peeling and quartering small brown potatoes. She simmers them in water seasoned with pan juices, bay leaf and sage before arranging them in a skillet where they turn darkly gold. She sprinkles paprika and seeds of blackest pepper over them. "Oh, yes," she says. "Oh, yes."

Best goddamn thing on wheels was how he put it, and Mavis hoped his affection for the ten-year-old Cadillac meant he'd give her a break.

She would never know if he did, but just before his shop closed for the day, the mechanic finished and took fifty labor, thirty-two parts, oil and gas thirteen, so almost all of the cornfield rent money was gone. Not another payment due from Mr. Person for three months. Still, there was enough for regular shopping, plus the paint Connie wanted (for the red chair, she guessed; but white too, so maybe the chicken coop), as well as the ice cream sticks. The twins were fond of them and ate them right away. But the Christmas toys had been untouched, so Mavis had spent the five-hour wait for the tuneup and repairs exchanging the Fisher-Price truck for a Tonka and the Tiny Tina doll for one that spoke. Soon Pearl would be old enough for a Barbie. It was amazing how they changed and grew. They could not hold their heads up when they departed, but when she first heard them in the mansion, they were already toddlers, two years old. Based on their laughter, she could tell precisely. And based on how well integrated they were with the other children who chased about the rooms, she knew how they grew. Now they were school age, six and a half, and Mavis had to think of age-appropriate birthday and Christmas presents.

She had been so lonely for them when she'd traveled back to Maryland in 1970. Watching recess at the school where she had enrolled Sal, Frankie and Billy James, she realized with a shock that Sal would be in junior high now, Billy James in third grade and Frankie in fifth.

Still, there was no question in her mind that she would recognize them, although she wasn't sure she would identify herself. It may have been her fingers clawed into the playground fencing or something awry in her face; whatever it was it must have frightened the students because a man came over and asked her questions-none of which she could answer. She hurried away trying to hide and look at the same time. She wanted to get to Peg's house but not be seen by Frank or nextdoor neighbors. When she found it-the bonneted girl still led the ducks-she wept. The rose of Sharon, so strong and wild and beautiful, had been chopped completely down. Only fear of being recognized kept her from running through the street. With swift and brilliant clarity, she understood that she was not safe out there or any place where Merle and Pearl were not. And that was before she telephoned Birdie and learned of the warrant.

Mavis had pushed her hair into a dark green tam, bought a pair of dime-store glasses and taken a bus to Washington, D. C., and on to Chicago. There she made the purchases Connie wanted for Mother, took another bus, another and arrived at the bus depot parking lot in Middleton, where she had left the Cadillac. Rushing to get the supplies to Connie and be in the company of her twins, she sped all the way. Nervous, shallow of breath, Mavis skidded up the driveway and braked near a nude Gigi who had already taken up residence in her shelter. For three years they bickered and fought and managed, for Connie's sake, to avoid murder. Mavis believed that it was Gigi's distraction with the man from Ruby that kept either one from picking up a knife. For Mavis would have done it, fought to the end anybody, including that street-tough bitch, who threatened to take her life and leave her children unprotected. So it was with sincere, even extravagant, welcome that she had greeted sweet Seneca. A welcome Gigi shared completely, for when Seneca arrived, she spit out that K. D. person like a grape seed. In the new configuration, Mavis' pride of place was secure. Even the sad little rich girl with the hurt but pretty face had not disturbed it. The twins were happy, and Mavis was still closer to Connie than any of the others. And it was because they were so close, understood each other so well, that Mavis had begun to worry. Not about Connie's nocturnal habits, or her drinking-or her not drinking, in fact, for the familiar fumes had disappeared recently.

Something else. The way Connie nodded as though listening to someone near; how she said Uh huh or If you say so, answering questions no one had asked. Also she not only had stopped using sunglasses but was dressed up, sort of, every day, in one of the dresses Soane Morgan used to give her when she was through with them. And on her feet were the shiny nun shoes that once sat on her dresser. But with merry laughter ringing in her own ears, ice cream sticks melting in the dead of winter, she was in a weak position to judge such things. Connie never questioned the reality of the twins and for Mavis, who had no intention of explaining or defending what she knew to be true, that acceptance was central. The night visitor was making fewer and fewer appearances, and while that concerned her, what preoccupied her was how fast Merle and Pearl were growing. And whether she could keep up. Six yellow apples, wrinkled from winter storage, are cored and floating in water. Raisins are heating in a saucepan of wine. Consolata fills the hollow of each apple with a creamy mixture of egg yolks, honey, pecans and butter, to which she adds, one by one, the wine-swollen raisins. She pours the flavored wine into a pan and plops the apples down in. The sweet, warm fluid moves.

The little streets were narrow and straight, but as soon as she made them they flooded. Sometimes she held toilet tissue to catch the blood, but she liked to let it run too. The trick was to slice at just the right depth. Not too light, or the cut yielded too faint a line of red. Not so deep it rose and gushed over so fast you couldn't see the street. Although she had moved the map from her arms to her thighs, she recognized with pleasure the traces of old roads, avenues that even Norma had been repelled by. One was sometimes enough for months. Then there were times when she did two a day, hardly giving a street time to close before she opened another one. But she was not reckless. Her instruments were clean, her iodine (better than Mercurochrome) plentiful. And she had added aloe cream to her kit.

The habit, begun in one of the foster homes, started as an accident. Before her foster brother-another kid in Mama Greer's house-got her underwear off the first time, a safety pin holding the waist of her jeans together where a metal button used to be opened and scratched her stomach as Harry yanked on them. Once the jeans were tossed away and he got to her panties, the line of blood excited him even more. She did not cry. It did not hurt. When Mama Greer bathed her, she clucked, "Poor baby. Why didn't you tell me?" and Mercurochromed the jagged cut. She was not sure what she should have told: the safety pin scratch or Harry's behavior. So she pinscratched herself on purpose and showed it to Mama Greer. Because the sympathy she got was diluted, she told her about Harry. "Don't you ever say that again. Do you hear me? Do you? Nothing like that happens here." After a meal of her favorite things, she was placed in another home. Nothing happened for years. Until junior high school, then the eleventh grade. By then she knew that there was something inside her that made boys snatch her and men flash her. If she was drinking Coke with five girls at a dime store counter, she was the one whose nipple got tweaked by a boy on a dare from his sniggering friends. Four girls, or just one, might walk down the street, but when she passed the man sitting with his baby daughter on a park bench, it was then he lifted his penis out and made kissing noises. Refuge with boyfriends was no better. They took her devotion for granted, but if she complained to them about being fondled by friends or strangers their fury was directed at her, so she knew it was something inside that was the matter.

She entered the vice like a censored poet whose suspect lexicon was too supple, too shocking to publish. It thrilled her. It steadied her. Access to this under garment life kept her own eyes dry, inducing a serenity rocked only by crying women, the sight of which touched off a pain so wildly triumphant she would do anything to kill it. She was ten and not cutting sidewalks when Kennedy was killed and the whole world wept in public. But she was fifteen when King was killed one spring and another Kennedy that summer. She called in sick to her baby-sitting job each time and stayed indoors to cut short streets, lanes, alleys into her arms. Her blood work was fairly easy to hide. Like Eddie Turtle, most of her boyfriends did it in the dark. For those who insisted on answers she invented a disease. Sympathy was instant for the scars did look surgical.

The safety available in Connie's house had become less intact when Pallas arrived. She had spent a lot of time trying to cheer and feed her, for when Pallas wasn't eating she was crying or trying not to. The relief that descended when the girl left last August disappeared when she returned in December-prettier, fatter, pretending she had just stopped by for a visit. In a limousine, no less. With three suitcases. It was January now, and her night sniffling could be heard all over the house.

The table is set; the food placed. Consolata takes off her apron. With the aristocratic gaze of the blind she sweeps the women's faces and says, "I call myself Consolata Sosa. If you want to be here you do what I say. Eat how I say. Sleep when I say. And I will teach you what you are hungry for."

The women look at each other and then at a person they do not recognize. She has the features of dear Connie, but they are sculpted somehow-higher cheekbones, stronger chin. Had her eyebrows always been that thick, her teeth that pearly white? Her hair shows no gray. Her skin is smooth as a peach. Why is she talking that way? And what is she talking about? they wonder. This sweet, unthreatening old lady who seemed to love each one of them best; who never criticized, who shared everything but needed little or no care; required no emotional investment; who listened; who locked no doors and accepted each as she was. What is she talking about, this ideal parent, friend, companion in whose company they were safe from harm? What is she thinking, this perfect landlord who charged nothing and welcomed anybody; this granny goose who could be confided in or ignored, lied to or suborned; this play mother who could be hugged or walked out on, depending on the whim of the child?

"If you have a place," she continued, "that you should be in and somebody who loves you waiting there, then go. If not stay here and follow me. Someone could want to meet you."

No one left. There were nervous questions, a single burst of frightened giggling, a bit of pouting and simulated outrage, but in no time at all they came to see that they could not leave the one place they were free to leave.

Gradually they lost the days.

In the beginning the most important thing was the template. First they Seneca did another street. An intersection, in fact, for it crossed had to scrub the cellar floor until its stones were as clean as rocks on a shore. Then they ringed the place with candles. Consolata told each to undress and lie down. In flattering light under Consolata's soft vision they did as they were told. How should we lie? However you feel. They tried arms at the sides, outstretched above the head, crossed over breasts or stomach. Seneca lay on her stomach at first, then changed to her back, hands clasping her shoulders. Pallas lay on her side, knees drawn up. Gigi flung her legs and arms apart, while Mavis struck a floater's pose, arms angled, knees pointing in. When each found the position she could tolerate on the cold, uncompromising floor, Consolata walked around her and painted the body's silhouette. Once the outlines were complete, each was instructed to remain there. Unspeaking. Naked in candlelight.

They wriggled in acute distress but were reluctant to move outside the mold they had chosen. Many times they thought they could not endure another second, but none wished to be the first to give in before those pale watching eyes. Consolata spoke first. "My child body, hurt and soil, leaps into the arms of a woman who teach me my body is nothing my spirit everything. I agreed her until I met another. My flesh is so hungry for itself it ate him. When he fell away the woman rescue me from my body again. Twice she saves it. When her body sickens I care for it in every way flesh works. I hold it in my arms and between my legs. Clean it, rock it, enter it to keep it breath. After she is dead I can not get past that. My bones on hers the only good thing. Not spirit. Bones. No different from the man. My bones on his the only true thing. So I wondering where is the spirit lost in this? It is true, like bones. It is good, like bones. One sweet, one bitter. Where is it lost? Hear me, listen. Never break them in two. Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary's mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve."

Then, in words clearer than her introductory speech (which none of them understood), she told them of a place where white sidewalks met the sea and fish the color of plums swam alongside children. She spoke of fruit that tasted the way sapphires look and boys using rubies for dice. Of scented cathedrals made of gold where gods and goddesses sat in the pews with the congregation. Of carnations tall as trees.

Dwarfs with diamonds for teeth. Snakes aroused by poetry and bells. Then she told them of a woman named Piedade, who sang but never said a word.

That is how the loud dreaming began. How the stories rose in that place. Half-tales and the never-dreamed escaped from their lips to soar high above guttering candles, shifting dust from crates and bottles. And it was never important to know who said the dream or whether it had meaning. In spite of or because their bodies ache, they step easily into the dreamer's tale. They enter the heat in the Cadillac, feel the smack of cold air in the Higgledy Piggledy. They know their tennis shoes are unlaced and that a bra strap annoys each time it slips from the shoulder. The Armour package is sticky. They inhale the perfume of sleeping infants and feel parent-cozy although they notice one's head is turned awkwardly. They adjust the sleeping baby head then refuse, outright refuse, what they know and drive away home. They climb porch stairs carrying frankfurters and babies and purse in their arms. Saying, "They don't seem to want to wake up, Sal. Sal? Look here. They don't seem to want to." They kick their legs underwater, but not too hard for fear of waking fins or scales also down below. The male voices saying saying forever saying push their own down their throats. Saying, saying until there is no breath to scream or contradict. Each one blinks and gags from tear gas, moves her hand slowly to the scraped shin, the torn ligament. Runs up and down the halls by day, sleeps in a ball with the lights on at night. Folds the five hundred dollars in the foot of her sock. Yelps with pain from a stranger's penis and a mother's rivalry-alluring and corrosive as cocaine. In loud dreaming, monologue is no different from a shriek; accusations directed to the dead and long gone are undone by murmurs of love. So, exhausted and enraged, they rise and go to their beds vowing never to submit to that again but knowing full well they will. And they do.

Life, real and intense, shifted to down there in limited pools of light, in air smoky from kerosene lamps and candle wax. The templates drew them like magnets. It was Pallas who insisted they shop for tubes of paint, sticks of colored chalk. Paint thinner and chamois cloth. They understood and began to begin. First with natural features: breasts and pudenda, toes, ears and head hair. Seneca duplicated in robin's egg blue one of her more elegant scars, one drop of red at its tip. Later on, when she had the hunger to slice her inner thigh, she chose instead to mark the open body lying on the cellar floor. They spoke to each other about what had been dreamed and what had been drawn. Are you sure she was your sister? Maybe she was your mother. Why? Because a mother might, but no sister would do such a thing. Seneca capped her tube. Gigi drew a heart locket around her body's throat, and when Mavis asked her about it, she said it was a gift from her father which she had thrown into the Gulf of Mexico. Were there pictures inside? asked Pallas. Yeah. Two. Whose? Gigi didn't answer; she simply reinforced the dots marking the locket's chain. Pallas had put a baby in her template's stomach. When asked who the father was, she said nothing but drew next to the baby a woman's face with long eyelashes and a crooked fluffy mouth. They pressed her, but gently, without joking or scorn. Carlos? The boys who drove her into the water? Pallas gave the crooked mouth two long fangs. January folded. February too. By March, days passed uncut from night as careful etchings of body parts and memorabilia occupied them. Yellow barrettes, red peonies, a green cross on a field of white. A majestic penis pierced with a Cupid's bow. Rose of Sharon petals, Lorna Doones. A bright orange couple making steady love under a childish sun.

With Consolata in charge, like a new and revised Reverend Mother, feeding them bloodless food and water alone to quench their thirst, they altered. They had to be reminded of the moving bodies they wore, so seductive were the alive ones below.

A customer stopping by would have noticed little change. May have wondered why the garden was as yet untilled, or who had scratched sorrow on the Cadillac's trunk. May even have wondered why the old woman who answered the knock did not cover her awful eyes with dark glasses; or what on earth the younger ones had done with their hair. A neighbor would notice more-a sense of surfeit; the charged air of the house, its foreign feel and a markedly different look in the tenants' eyes-sociable and connecting when they spoke to you, otherwise they were still and appraising. But if a friend came by, her initial alarm at the sight of the young women might be muted by their adult manner; how calmly themselves they seemed. And Connie-how straight-backed and handsome she looked. How well that familiar dress became her. As she slid into the driver's seat, a basket with a parcel on top beside her, it would annoy her at first being unable to say exactly what was absent. As she drew closer to home and drove down Central Avenue, her gaze might fall on Sweetie Fleetwood's house, Pat Best's house, or she might notice one of the Poole boys or Menus on his way to Ace's. Then she might realize what was missing: unlike some people in Ruby, the Convent women were no longer haunted. Or hunted either, she might have added. But there she would have been wrong.